Turtles, Radio Astronomy, and Dimesional Rifts
by Octarine Nova
Summary: One-shot: Near future, astronomers can use radio astronomy to control dimensional portals to alternate dimensions, including "book" worlds. One opens somewhere that they don't expect... Constructive flames only please-give your reason why you don't lik


James Minor

Soft! What Light Through Wonder Dimensional Rift Breaks? (A Discworld Short-story)

On a mountain whose slopes stretched across half an island, and whose summit was covered in snow even though it was in the tropics, a snowstorm was brewing. As it rose up the sides of the peak to engulf the telescopes located there, a small figure, almost ant-like next to the telescopes, was seen hurrying into one of the buildings ahead of the snow. All was calm on Mauna Kea.

"Any news?" Christine Wilson asked as she pulled off her coat and headed for the control room. "Anything interesting in the latest crop of data?"

"No," Glen replied, "but something seems to be coming in. The telescopes have been picking up unusually high omega radio waves. From what the machines are saying now, the source is probably in orbit above California, and the readings are off the charts."

Omega waves. That meant a dimensional rift was forming.

A few months ago, an illustrious group of astrophysicists had concluded that the new emission type, commonly called omega waves by astronomers, was related to wormhole creation, possibly involving extra-dimensional influences. The calculations were—well—conclusive. Highly so. This meant that even though the public didn't hear about it, several million dollars of international governmental funding was set aside to pursue research into this field. Several _billion_ dollars of funding for research were set aside when the initial research was able to predict a rift forming in Washington DC, immediately before a soldier out of some alternate extension of World War I dropped onto the president's desk.

Even more importantly, it was found that by emitting the right wavelength of radio waves, a dimensional rift could be induced to open and—even more importantly—close. After the initial incident, small rifts had been forming every week or so, generally small enough to only let a few people through them before they collapsed.

No one knew why it was suddenly happening so regularly. The most common hypothesis was that it was always happening on a small level, and recently something had happened to increase the process, perhaps related to the ever-increasing power output of the earth. The rifts always did seem to form in areas of high population and power density. Whatever was causing it, it was rapidly becoming an increasing security threat to almost every country in the world.

Mauna Kea was the centre of this new generation of radio observations, since it was one of the few fully equipped observatories of the right type in the first world. Projects like ALMA in the third world had been immediately nationalized when the governments in question had discovered the new importance of radio waves. They "didn't want to rely on the first world for help." ALMA was presently acting as Mauna Kea's counterpart for Russia, China, the DPRK, Iran, and most of the third world.

Thus far, there wasn't enough importance attributed to these events to be worth mentioning to the public at all, and so, in spite of all logic to the contrary, optical astronomers were still enjoying more media attention. With their new pictures of the dark side of the moon from the latest space shuttle, no attention was being paid to the radio astronomers. Suffice it to say radio astronomers were itching for an opportunity to have a rift form that was large enough to catch public interest and, hopefully, to be long lived enough to get some decent readings of the other side.

Wilson pinched the bridge of her nose. As one of the more senior radio astronomers in the world, and the most senior one here, she was in charge. It was going to be a long night. "Pass me a cup of coffee and show me the readings," she said, sliding into a chair near the controls.

"You've got to be kidding me." Three hours and eight cups of coffee later the rift had become fully formed.

The control room had become a good deal messier by this point. Even though it was now 2 am (local time) over eight other astronomers were crammed into the room with Glen and Christine. Coffee cups were scattered everywhere besides the central table, because of the radio pseudo-images that were now being spread over it of what was being seen through the colossal rift, which was now over a hundred kilometers in diameter and growing, though, fortunately, it was expanding _away_ from the earth.

Christine, still the most senior astronomer on site (though several others were present via web cam and speaker phone, looked over the images incredulously. They showed a turtle, no, the _head_ of a turtle, no, the head of a _space_ turtle that was over a hundred kilometers across. And that was just the head.

Around the edges of the head were the hints of, well, a world. A _flat_ world carried, apparently, on the back of what appeared to be four giant elephants that in turn stood on the turtle.

"Th—that's ridiculous!" one of the junior astronomers spluttered. "That _cannot _exist! The reading must be wrong! We'll check them again! We'll—"

"If you are _finished_, Michael," Christine interrupted in a tone of voice that allowed no room for argument, "then we can proceed to dealing with the…situation. I'm going to report that this was an equipment glitch, and that the high omega wave reading was a fluke. If no one has a problem with this—" she glanced around the room, checking with the more senior astronomers who were present via web cam, "—we'll start saturating the rift zone with radio waves to begin to close the rift. We can tell the governments that we're bombarding the area with radio waves just in case we missed something. If we're lucky, we'll be able to close it before anything comes through, and so we'll be spared the embarrassment of having to explain to the world how a giant turtle carrying a world could possibly exist, even in an alternate dimension. I have the feeling that 'it's an infinite universe' isn't going to cut it this time." Apparently, no one had a problem with that, because they all filed out of the room without comment as the astronomers from abroad signed out of the conversation.

"Glen—do you have a minute?" Christine said as he was about to become the last person to exit the room.

"Um…yes? I don't think they need me yet, though the key word there is yet. I have a feeling they'll need everyone that they can find to deal with this one, since we'll be pushing the equipment to its limits."

"Do me a favour and make sure to record the interdimensional frequency of the rift, will you? Unofficially, of course" Christine added, her eyes twinkling. "I have a feeling that my son might want to revisit that dimension someday."


End file.
